Friday, August 28, 2009

Pervasive games - digital game that uses the physical world as a playground - is often a game-play, reminiscent of a treasure hunt combined with orienteering and adventure games. It does certainly not have to be this way. In Germany you will find this new adventure and award winning game:

The game is strategical, uses the possibilities of technology to give a classic game of tag entirely new dimensions. There are ethical or at least security issues associated with the game as I could imagine that when players become engrossed, they would tend to forget about safety in traffic and being considerate of non-players who come in their way. But these are speculations, the fact is that the game offers interesting opportunities for more action packed pervasive gaming.

The game was developed by Fast Food Challenge and you can download the game from their website, where you can also see if your mobile can run the game.

This game will undoubtedly make you break a sweat! Who would lake to join me? Man overboard!

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Art is not about decorating world, but to take responsibility and move the world, says architect Olafur Elisson.

Eliasson has created many works around the world. In one of them - Green River - where he poured green paint in a river in Los Angeles, Stockholm, Moss (Norway), Bremen and Tokyo to give the inhabitants of the town a sense of space, its dimensions and what time and motion means for space. In that way the inhabitants can experience how their body is a part of the given space and that there is a consequence of their presence. According to Eliasson, this give people a sense of the materiality of space and thereby the knowledge that they can actually change space. It makes space available to the public.

If you go to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (with I highly recommend!) You can experience The Matter of Time , which is a work by Richard Serra. It consists of huge rusty iron plates, which stands on the floor and form corridors that the audience can explore and get lost in. Some of the corridors are shaped like ellipses, some are parallel. The great thing about the installation, is that while walking through it you can fell how the surroundings affect your body. You may actually find that you begin to tilt to one side, with the walls - or that you get the feeling of being crushed when the walls lean inward and closes at the top.

Richard Serra describes his work like this:

"The sculptures are not objects that its separately in the space, actually quite the opposite is true, they engender a spatial continuity with the environment In which they exist."

Serra and Eliasson alike are working with something I am very interested in, namely: How do we experience the spaces we inhabit, how do we influence on space and vice versa; and what does this mean for design of art installations (landscape) architecture, and games (pervasive games) that are set in physical space? The spaces we engage in is created and shaped by the way we use it, and it affects us even more than we sometimes realize.

Links

Who is squeezing? The author

I am PhD fellow at Centre for Playware (University of Aarhus, Danish School of Education). My research is focused on pervasive play. I am especially interested in understanding how the users engage with and perceive the games, and what kind of play pervasive games makes possible.
Through experiments and observations I am exploring how gaming in physical space can alter the experience of the space.
In my spare time I love travelling, taking loads of pictures, meeting people and playing around exploring the world around me. I do play a lot of games as well (digital games, board games and well games anywhere...)